The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Published 1993 · 65,478 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Coming-of-Age, Literary Fiction

How hard is The Virgin Suicides to read?

The Virgin Suicides scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
The prose draws on contemporary suburban American vocabulary of the 1970s, with occasional literary flourishes ("seraglio," medical jargon such as "platelet serotonin receptor indices"), and period-specific brand names and pop culture references. Readers rarely need a dictionary; context clarifies most unfamiliar terms.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
Sentences range from taut fragments to elaborate subordinate clauses, frequently nesting memory-within-memory constructions: "Trip Fontaine explained years later, in the desert, drying out from that and everything else." Long catalog sentences appear alongside one-line dialogue exchanges. Comparable to The Great Gatsby in rhythmic balance, with occasional Proustian accumulation.
Abstraction: 55 out of 100
Philosophical rumination arrives obliquely and always wrapped in sensory specificity — the meaning of the suicides hovers as abstraction, but the text grounds it in dying elms, candlewax, and jasmine soap. The narrators' confessed incomprehension converts the novel's central question (why?) into an irreducibly abstract one, but the texture remains concrete.
Information density: 48 out of 100
Information loads steadily without overwhelming. The mock-forensic structure parcels out evidence in fragments — diary entries, exhibit numbers, newspaper quotes, interview transcripts — requiring readers to track multiple evidentiary streams. Denser than a conventional retrospective novel but far below the encyclopedic density of 2666 or Ulysses.
Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
The collective narrator confesses its ignorance on nearly every page: "we think," "we can't be sure," "the interpretation is, we think, quite obvious." The reader must read through the narrators' unreliable mediation, which is itself reading through media reports, diary fragments, and neighborhood gossip. Comparable to The Great Gatsby's Nick-filter but with more programmatic epistemological uncertainty built into the structure.
Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
The doomed elm tree (imported European disease, temporarily saved by the girls), the Virgin Mary laminated cards, the Chinese lantern's untranslatable Morse signals, and the flooded rec room where Cecilia's party was never cleaned up all carry substantial symbolic weight. The lake turning green from algae, the fish flies, and the "dying empire" framing extend this into the broader American landscape. Comparable to The Great Gatsby's green light and valley of ashes but more diffuse across objects.
Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
The adult narrators' retrospective obsession with the Lisbon girls is voyeuristic, possessive, and self-serving — a fact the text makes visible without the narrators fully acknowledging it. Eugenides lets the collective gaze implicate itself rather than editorializing. Less destabilizing than Lolita's Humbert, but the reader must maintain dual awareness throughout.
Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
The why of the suicides is explicitly and programmatically withheld. The narrators state outright that no explanation suffices and the girls remain permanently opaque. The novel closes on the deaths but not on meaning — the investigation yields more mystery, not less. Significantly more resistant to closure than The Great Gatsby; closer to Beloved in its structural refusal to resolve.
Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
The frame narrative (middle-aged men looking back decades) constantly interrupts chronological story with "years later" testimonies, exhibit citations, newspaper articles, and diary excerpts. The evidentiary structure — a mock forensic dossier — is formally distinctive and requires readers to track what counts as evidence and who is speaking. Less fragmented than Flights or Infinite Jest but more formally loaded than a conventional retrospective narrator.

How The Virgin Suicides is regarded

The Virgin Suicides holds a literary regard score of 70 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Virgin Suicides sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (123 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Virgin Suicides scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic (shading Ironic)
Mr. Lisbon taught high-school math. He was thin, boyish, stunned by his own gray hair.
Symbol: Literal & Descriptive
Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia's suicide attempt.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
A year had passed and still we knew nothing.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
Exhibits #1 through #97, arranged in five separate suitcases, each bearing a photograph of the deceased like a Coptic headstone

Where the story of The Virgin Suicides takes place

  • A Detroit suburb, 1974-1975 (1974 to 1975), the main setting
  • Lakeside Detroit suburb, June 1974 to July 1975 (1974 to 1975)

5 things that are true of The Virgin Suicides, with the passage for each

  1. The five Lisbon sisters are aged thirteen through seventeen.

    The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecilia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).

  2. Cecilia dies by falling onto a fence spike during her own party.

    the spike that had punctured her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either

  3. Trip Fontaine claims to have slept with 418 girls and women.

    the four hundred and eighteen girls and women he had made love to during his long career

  4. The cemetery workers' strike that delays burials lasts 409 days.

    the cemetery workers' strike was settled after 409 days of arbitration

  5. The narrators keep their evidence as numbered exhibits up to #97.

    Exhibits #1 through #97, arranged in five separate suitcases

Scenes in The Virgin Suicides that Frye would name

50 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
the moist thud jolted us, the sound of a watermelon breaking open Cecilia's second, fatal leap at the party is the novel's central pathos.
Pathos, untitled
Above him, in a pink dress, Bonnie looked clean and festive, like a pifiata. Bonnie's hanging in the party-decorated rec room.
Anagnorisis, untitled
We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out. The boys recognize at last that they never knew the girls.
Katabasis, untitled
as we descended, holding on to one another's belt loops, we traveled back to the day a year earlier The final descent into the flooded rec room, a time-reversing underworld.
Displacement, untitled
the two slaves offering the victim to the altar (lifting the stretcher into the truck), the priestess brandishing the torch (waving the flannel nightgown) Sacrificial ritual shows through the realistic paramedic scene.
Sparagmos, untitled
the spike that had punctured her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either The impaled body is a literal tearing of the victim.

Books that share these scenes with The Virgin Suicides

About the author

Jeffrey Eugenides